It’s a bit awkward when your a I.T. professional and you realize that you no longer need a PC at home.
It started out innocently enough… I bought a Mac in 2007 and a new one in 2011 and my bank account quietly wept both times.
I upgraded to Windows 8 in the fall of last year. Why? Well why not I’m a I.T. professional I need to be versed on all forms of the dominant operating systems in the land in their native forms (GUI for Windows, CLI or LINUX, and a unholy combination of the two for Mac OS). I then did the requiste app upgrades that come with any upgrade to windows… I lost the ability to get into work… The Citrix client for Windows 8 is to advanced for the Citrix presentation server that my work uses, and I can’t downgrade versions because Citrix is dumb.
That’s not a issue I can Citrix into work on my Mac.
I find that I have less time to play games and few games that come out really intrest me, I stop buying $60 games. I start buying games that are on sale which means they are a few months old and increasingly have a Mac version by that point… This matters little since the only game I’m really interested in playing is Batman Arkham City on my Xbox
I install a hybrid drive on my Mac… and things (well some things) launch so so so fast (sub 1 second for Chrome I shit you not) (from cold boot to password screen for disk encryption is 7 seconds)
I get pissed off when I go to look for the calculator on my Windows 8 box… years of muscle memory and a certain f*’d up logic out the proverbial window.
The temperature hits 90 about 3 weeks ago, it hits 95 in my office (I haven’t turned on my AC yet (personal thing global warming be damned I don’t turn on the AC before April 15)) I turn off my main PC to keep from so much heat being kicked out. That was 3 weeks ago I haven’t turned my pc on since then. It took me a week to even notice that I hadn’t turned it on.
The change was so subtle I didn’t even notice it till I had been fully consumed. Not to say there isn’t a place for the PC in my world (“Skyrim” is still PC only) the environment for the level of work that I do has reached parity to a point that the platform matters not.
The bigger point here is I have finally shed the ingrained need for a “Full Desktop” PC and have finally come to a point where I laptop is everything I need a main computer. This notion is already on a dead man walking path though… The tablet in the living room will see to that in short order.
This leaves the following thought the future of a the high powered all powerful time and space bending machine as a thing of the past. In the next couple of years the home computer will be nothing more then a server for the mobile devices that need local content caching, the rest of it lives on the internet through a always on society.
Even the top end of the market where I used to live will no longer need high powered machines for gaming the processing power for the high definition polygons will live on a server in a datacenter that scales massively for the latest AAA title where the gamers of tomorrow pay for a license fee and then time of use for processing power (think amazon cloud only games instead of big data) the only limitation being the available bandwidth on the local internet connection.
“Anubis” is the last of the big gaming rigs… I quietly weep at this thought.